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FOIA exec: Spotsylvania e-mails should be open

Open government guru calls county attorney's opinion not to disclose e-mails 'disturbing'

Date published: 10/2/2007

By DAN TELVOCK

An e-mail between a Spotsylvania County supervisor and a Republican Party leader was a transaction of public business and sections should not have been blacked out, the head of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government said yesterday.

Jennifer Perkins, the coalition's executive director, said the county should have provided the e-mail in its original form when it responded to Freedom of Information Act requests from Spotsylvania School Superintendent Jerry Hill and The Free Lance-Star.

Hill filed his FOIA request in May, seeking all records of allegations used against him or connected to his criminal case last year on an election-law violation and an obstruction of justice charge stemming from a school bond referendum. Both charges were dropped last summer.

Hill has said he filed the FOIA request because he is exploring a civil lawsuit. He would not say who the suit would name.

The county provided Hill with about 60 e-mails. Two between Supervisor Gary Jackson and Russ Moulton, chairman of the GOP's local state senate and congressional district committees, had chunks blacked out.

County Attorney Jacob Stroman said those sections were "not even remotely related to the transaction of public business."

Moulton gave The Free Lance-Star a copy of his original e-mail to Jackson Friday and the newspaper published it Saturday. The blacked-out section criticized Hill and King George County Commonwealth's Attorney Matt Britton, who was the special prosecutor in the Hill case.

The Free Lance-Star was unable to obtain an original copy of Jackson's reply to Moulton.

After reviewing copies of the e-mail exchange and Stroman's letter explaining why he blacked out some content, Perkins said yesterday she "wholeheartedly" disagrees with the county attorney. She called his reasoning "disturbing."

"He has contorted both the letter and the spirit of the FOIA law and guidelines for e-mail retention set out in the Public Records Act to come up with his own very unique definition of what is not in the transaction of the public business," she said.

"He manages to sidestep the central issue here, which is whether or not the content was in the transaction of public business."

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Date published: 10/2/2007